UNSD MDG Team wins UN21 Award on “Team Productivity”

In recognition of its outstanding work in Monitoring Millennium Development Goals Progress, the United Nations Statistics Division has been selected to receive the prestigious UN 21 Award in the category of “Team Productivity”.

The UNSD team has worked since 2002 to provide a sound statistical basis for the international political debate on the MDGs and for the development of effective strategies to achieve the goals. The team has coordinated the work of the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on MDG Indicators, established at the request of the Secretary-General, and responsible for monitoring global and regional MDG trends, reviewing methodologies and supporting countries in data collection, analysis and reporting for MDG indicators. The team’s coordination efforts have led to an unprecedented level of inter-agency collaboration, contributed to improve the consistency of data disseminated and used by international agencies and facilitated the use of statistics by a wide range of users. Countries have benefited from the coherent and focused approach taken by IAEG in many ways, including: increased attention by national governments to statistical systems; improved use of statistics in policy making and monitoring; improved understanding of national development priorities, increased adoption by countries of international statistical standards; and improved coordination of statistical capacity building initiatives by international partners.

A number of very successful statistical outputs and publications have been produced that are widely disseminated and represent an important basis to inform the international community and government and civil society in countries.

• MDG Report in 2003, 2004 and 2005
• The Millennium Development Goals Report 2005, launched by the Secretary General in June 2005 and the Millennium Development Goals Report 2006, launched by the Deputy Secretary-General in July 2006.
• Millennium Development Goals: Progress Report, issued in 2004, 2005 and 2006, a coloured chart of easy interpretation for wide dissemination to a “non-technical” audience, presenting an assessment of what regions and sub-regions are on or off-track in the achievement of the goals.
• MDG Info 2005 and MDG Info 2006, an adaptation of DevInfo containing the country data series and related metadata, the regional data, the MDG report and a number of useful tools for the creation of tables, maps and graphs on the MDGs.
• MDG Indicators Database, a data base with country data series, metadata and a number of additional reference documents, regularly updated with the most up-to-date available information (mdgs.un.org).

The success of the UNSD team demonstrates how the United Nations system, through a well coordinated mechanism of reporting and analysis preparation, has been able to come together to agree in a coherent and integrated process to assess -- using reliable quantitative statistics -- the progress of the global development effort.

For more information on the UNSD project on Monitoring Millenium Development Goals Progress, please visit our website at : http://mdgs.un.org